“Eccoilleone!” brayed Iago in
Verdi’s OTELLO – “Here is the lion of Venice,!”gesturing at a couchant
title hero at the climax to Act 3.

What ever would he
have brayed – in a fortissimo of admiration – at the 61st Mostra
del Cinema? There were 61 sculpted golden lions, no less, outside the
festival palace and they were far from couchant.
Each one stood mutely roaring on a scarlet pedestal that glowed from within
at night and even changed its shades of red. (Pink, mauve, vermilion,rose madder….)
There were more lions, in ones or twos, around every corner on the LidodiVenezia, grimacing imperiously
from plinths. Any visitor with cat allergy was dead on arrival.

New festival
director Marco Muller had thrown a million euros at film production designer
Dante Ferretti (of Scorsese’s
GANGS OF NEW YORK). And Ferretti had obliged by buying up all the gold and red
poster paint in northern Italy. The
hope was that a gaudy show would lure the world to the Adriatic and it
did. For two weeks in September the Lido had to
change its name by deed poll to Hollywood. It
could no longer masquerade as a quiet Italian beach resort if it was lodging
Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Robert De Niro, Will Smith, MerylStreep, Scarlett Johansson – we could go on but rainforests and
cyberspace are limited.

Muller took over
the job from Moritz de Hadeln, only two years in
office. It was one of those Venicecoups that no one understands but
Venetians. It’s a dog’s life for a festival doge. You get fussed over as a
puppy, then handed over to the dog-catcher as soon
as you start growing into the job.

How long Muller
will last is a subject for speculation, since he seems already to have grown
into the job. His first event had a Babylonian pizazz.
Not just lions and movie stars but up-tempo embellishments like the giant
transparencies – glowing film images in monochrome and colour – that were
thrown onto the four-storey façade of the Casino, which houses screening
rooms and super press officer MichelaLazzarin. The images moved across the building like a
procession of luminous cloud patterns, like Tiepolo
frescoes made modern and mobile, like – oh like anything you like. It was
glorious. It was gobsmacking.

Then there were the
films themselves, often a forgotten element in a film festival. Promising a
“thinner and nimbler” programme, Muller ended up skedding
more good pics than anyone could remember in three score years of
cine-junkets. Some of my colleagues were even faced with the terrible
obligation to get up in the morning. For not all the must-see movies could be
fitted in, as in some years, and some other festivals, after 5pm.

Another
prognostication was dead in the water early on. “It’s a poor year for Asian
cinema.” Not with Hayao Miyazaki’s HOWL’S MOVING
CASTLE, Jia Zhang-ke’s
THE WORLD, Kim Ki-duk’s 3-IRON and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s CAFÉ LUMIERE.
These were the tip of the oriental iceberg, the best-in-show in a searingly convincing year for eastern movies.

Miyazaki, the
maker of PRINCESS MONONOKE and SPIRITED AWAY, is a living legend at age 63.
If his animated features were any greater, he would be proclaimed a god. The
queue for HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE at Venice was
longer than the average admission line at Lourdes or the Vatican, and
the film itself was a religious experience. You went in seeking uplift, joy
and redemption and came out with all three, plus a free press pack. (Some
didn’t like it).

The young girl
turned into a crone by a wicked witch; her friend the turnip-headed
scarecrow, hopping long distances on a single stick; her foes the
shape-changing black blob creatures who crawl out of walls, sporting straw
boaters for surreally cheerful effect; the talking hearth-fire greedy for
everything from logs to gobs of egg spilled from a frying pan (“Yummy”).
Above all the title fortress, a clanking, steaming enormity that keeps
heaving into view on skylines in the time-warped wonderland, where the
clothes are circa MARY POPPINS and the buildings are from every century you
can think of. The castle is the proud property of the handsome Howl, an
Adonis lordling who hates bad hair days. “If one can’t
be beautiful, what’s the point of living?” he complains, shaking long and
lyrical tresses that most of would kill for even on a good hair day.

How these pieces de resistance coalesce into the
irresistible, and how Miyazaki makes
even the everyday so magical that it captures your memory for ever, must
remain a miracle of cinema, eternally to be marvelled at. Japanimation
is not like Disney or Dreamworks. It doesn’t boast
advanced technology, kinetic virtuosity or trompel’oeilthree-dimensionalism. Visually
it’s as simple as the pictures in a kids’ book. But it proves that sleight of
imagination always has the advantage over mere sleight of draughtsmanship or
computer keyboard.

Theme parks are
sleights of geography. Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s THE WORLD is set in World Park, the true-life Beijing
attraction where a near-fullscaleEiffelTower
eyeballs an ersatz Egyptian pyramid, and Venice is
around the corner from Ulan Bator. A
kingdom of kitsch is an unlikely setting for the austere maker of PLATFORM
and UNKNOWN PLEASURES. Jia is a major-league
minimalist. The bodies of spectators are still being dug up who were bored to
death by his debut XIAO WU.

But THE WORLD –
which also bored a few people at Venice (in
case he is suspected of selling out) – uses its pleasure park milieu to
create complex layers of actuality and artifice, of ‘life’ and ‘lie’. The
human stories of its workers, mainly a young security guard and the showgirl
he loves, are set against the fantasy universe in which they punch their
cards. Poverty, heartache, homesickness: all the
true ‘universals’ are made more poignant, more palpable by artful contrast
with the hollow giantism of an illusionary echo
chamber.

Venice’s own world
park – eastern sector – ushered us on into Korea, then Taiwan. Kim Ki-duk’s 3-IRON is a darkly droll winner from the Zen
wizard who made THE ISLE and SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN WINTER…AND SPRING. The
hero is a serial squatter who breaks into houses and uses them as crash-pads.
Then he meets an abused wife pining for love, soon followed by a dead body.
Did you know that a prison cell can teach a person to be a poltergeist? That
human life aspires to the condition of ghosthood?
That you may not be who you who think you are?

If Kim Ki-duk is Zen, Hou Hsiao-hsien is double-Zen. The Taiwan
director’s CAFÉ LUMIERE, made in homage to the centenary of YasujiroOzu (who’d be 100 if
he were alive), is a tribute from one minimalist to another. Hou’s shots are like frames from a stained glass window, though like Ozu his only
church is the church of human life. A young Tokyo girl (YoHitoto) casually tells her
parents and bookshop-owning best friend that she is pregnant. Who’s the
father? Doesn’t matter. He’s a forgotten absence in a world of meshing
presences: a life where casual absorptions – a visit to her folks (very TOKYO
STORY), a ride on the tram, a research project on a composer – criss-cross in
enchanted patterns, like the railways that are her pal’s obsession and the
film’s leitmotif.

Hou says
his style “is completely different from Ozu’s”.
Cobblers. Whom is he kidding? We have all seen FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI, CITY
OF SADNESS (Venice
Golden Lion 1989) and the incomparable SUMMER AT GRANDPA’S. Hou’s best cinema reincarnates Ozu’s.
He divides his screen up into glowing domestic geometries where a square of
window or rectangle of coloured curtain have the
magical force of a Mondrian painting. He knows that
the right shot, perfectly framed, can be lingered on forever, a force field
for human revelation. He knows that the right silence, like the henpecked
father’s droll reluctance to engage the issue of his child’s pregnancy, tells
more than words. He knows that the right cityscape – like the picturesque
sandwich of crisscrossing riverside rail-lines that recurs like some fantastic
definition of the heroine’s mazily embroidered life
(or all our lives) – makes nonsense of the priorities prized by other movies.
Plot,
action, intrigue, dialogue. Who needs them? Phoo
to the finite. Give us the infinite.

Actually the finite
is fun in its place. That thought brings us to Hollywood, which
Marco Muller, as stated, brought intact to Venice.
COLLATERAL (Jamie Foxx having a bad fare day), THE TERMINAL (bad air day), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (bad scare day.) and their ilk
exploded every mezzanotte
in the Sala Grande, spectacular and ephemeral as
fireworks.

The only pauses in
the madness were supplied by the administrative headache of decanting actual
stars onto the red carpet before each film. Some shows started over an hour
late because the limmos simply wouldn’t arrive,
although they had only to drive 400 metres from the Excelsior Hotel. (Did
they stop for petrol? For map consultations?) Spectators found lifeless in
their seats were taken away while healthy substitutes slipped into their
places, Oscar-night-style. Mira Nair’s VANITY FAIR, a Thackeray adaptation
that clocked in at an already menacing 140 minutes, began so late that Reese
Witherspoon (in the film as Becky), appearing in public on the arm of Ryan
Philippe (not in the film but a free bonus for Venice rubberneckers
as Reese’s new mate), turned from legally blonde to illegally brunette with
strands of grey.

Protest notes were
posted on bulletin boards in the tent city where we journos
ate our pasta between films. “No more delays!” “Basta!”
“Give us punctuality or give us death!”

But we had no heart
for real rebellion.The flicks were
too good.There was a rarity of
walkouts and an amazing incidence of fly-ins. Bats and moths were very keen
on the Palagalileo, the theatre on the green,
especially when showing Asian films. And there were weird, rich convergences
of theme. A film festival can make you believe that the world thinks as one.
From two unconnected directors there are suddenly two films about abortion:
Mike Leigh’s VERA DRAKE and Todd Solondz’s
PALINDROMES. Or three films obsessed with children and their fate in a cruel:
Gianni Amelio’s THE HOUSE KEYS, Gregg Araki’s
MYSTERIOUS SKIN and – again – PALINDROMES.

Weakest movie,
sadly, is the last. Solondz is still trying to give
us an encore after HAPPINESS. But as Orson Welles found, how do you follow
the unfollowable? PALINDROMES is
like Solondz’s last effort, STORYTELLING: a
five-finger exercise, clever without depth, that displays metafictive
wit while attempting to deconstruct its own narrative. Aviva,
the palindromic young heroine, gets pregnant, is
forced to have an abortion, flees her home and stumbles on a smiling
religious sect peddling salvation and murder. Aviva
is played by seven different actresses and one 12-year-old actor for a
flimsily tendentious reason: that like palindromes we all go through changes
but don’t really change. We are left feeling that there may be ten different Solondzes, of whom we’ve already, alas, met the one who
is an unrepeatable genius.

VERA DRAKE is a
Mike Leigh movie with a powerhouse performance – or do we mean power-hose?
Imelda Staunton spends the last scenes weeping her heart out as the 1950
working-class mum and spare-time abortionist finally nabbed by the police.
Hypocritical values of a class-divided society? A parallel story chronicles a
rich girl’s unpunished pregnancy termination after a date rape, illustrating
that the wealthy could afford to have their birth-cancellations signed and
approved by the medical establishment. (Today abortion is legal in Britain).

The second story is
dropped summarily, and a little startlingly, as soon as it has made its
point. But that clears the screen for a brilliant evocation of postwar proletarian Britain, dingy,
goodhearted, would-be genteel and forever boiling
pots of tea as if a cuppa char was the balm that could cure all ills. Leigh’s
film was an early tip for Golden Lion, with acompanying
Best Actress bets on Staunton’s
standout thesping.

Italy’s own
lionisation bid was Gianni Amelio’s THE HOUSE KEYS,
sensitively limning the love between a disabled teenager and the reunited dad
who, 15 years after abandoning the baby at birth (when the mother died in
labour), now accompanies him to Berlin.
Reason? Some make-or-break, or possibly break-and-remake, hospital treatmentBut the
boy is yanked away early, after a few sessions of neo-Nazi walking therapy
(“Links, recht! Links, recht!”),
and the drama focuses on a different healing: that of the bond between father
and son. Touchingly acted, directed with tact and quiet power.

Gregg Araki’s
MYSTERIOUS SKIN led the year’s sideshow sleepers. Araki has long been a kind
of subs-bench Gus Van Sant. Making gay flicks on the margin, he sometimes look good enough to be promoted to the main team. Here two
kids diverge into separate adolescences from a shared experience of
paedophilia at the hands of a school sports coach. One becomes a
well-adjusted gay, the other a swottishmophead convinced he was once the victim of alien
abduction. (With all that that entails…) Will they meet? Will they compare
emotional stigmata – “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine”? Will they
become better, happier people? Pretty much yes. This is a fairy tale. And we
mean that in the nicest and least bigoted sense. Great colour photography by
Steve Gainer.

This festival was
so stuffed with goodies that we can’t wolf the lot here, or you and I would
get intellectual indigestion. Best to star-mark standout items, so you can
order them the next time you see them on a menu. (Not to mention ice cream
from Cina’s, the gelateria all the best people
know on the Lido).

**** MAR ADENTRO
(THE SEA WITHIN). Spanish-Chilean helmer Alejandro Amenabar follows his Kidman spook story THE OTHERS with
this quietly gripping ‘room with a view’ drama. Bedridden chap (Javier Bardem) seeks assisted suicide. Can he be saved by the
love a good woman? Make that two good women: kindly
villager and lawyer who rallies to his cause. The film – so undemonstrative
it might have come and gone – was saved by the love of a good audience. And a
good jury, who lavished the runner-up Grand Jury Prize, plus Best Actor award
to Bardem.

***FAMILIA RODANTE
(ROLLING FAMILY). Or, how to be dysfunctional in Argentina. A
quarrelling family takes to the tarmac in this vibrant, characterful
satire on kith and kinship by writer-director Pablo Trapero.
Can they reach the wedding they are making for on the far side of the
country?Or will they become emotional
roadkill somewhere between Buenos
Aires and the Brazilian border?

**EROS. Artistic
quality so-so, curiosity value off the chart. Wong Kar-wai,
Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni together in one movie!?! Pass the smelling
salts. On second thoughts pass the script doctor, at least for Steve’s and
Mike’s episodes in this narrative three-pack, the former offering a tinny
sketch about a patient and shrink, the latter a carnal triangle full of yawny dialoguing between the sex bouts. Wong’s opener is
a beauty, though, picturesquely pitching humble tailor Chang Chen into the
den of courtesan Gong Li and seeing whether she eats him alive. She does.

****KILLER SHRIMPS.
Four stars for title. Didn’t see film.

**THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.“There was a young merchant of Venice, Who
found Jewish lenders a menace, Especially the old meano,
Played by Al Pacino, Who didn’t know mercy from
tennis.” (Loved the costumes. Loved you, Al. Shame about the rest).

****THE THREE ROOMS
OF MELANCHOLIA. Weird and interesting. Finnish documentaristPirjoHonkasalo looks at
three centres of war in greater Russia, or rather one hot spot (Grozny) and two training
centres. One of those is official, the naval academy at Kronstadt,
the other unofficial: the border country in Ingushetya, where Chechen orphans are conscripted into
Islam. The film’s even stare and voiceless commentary – the only overvoices are our own! – are all that’s required in
response to the chilling articulacy of the faces, mostly very young and very
scared.

***THE FIFTH EMPIRE
– YESTERDAY AS TODAY. Cuckoo time in Old Castile. Portugal
actually; only that doesn’t alliterate. 95-year-old Manoel
De Oliveira – will he be the first filmmaker to shout “Action” at 100? – does
fustian history plays like few others. That’s because few others do fustian
history plays. But what fire here, what madness, what vivid colours, what stormtrooping acting in this can’t-stop-watching chunk of
theatre aboutpower-crazed 16th
century King Sebastiao (Ricardo Trepa).

There were
raspberries at Venice as well
as ra-ras. Who could forget, however much he might
try, the cumbrous contrivances of WimWenders’sLAND OF PLENTY, a
post-9/11 paranoia thriller set in LA that gives BushiteAmerica a new
kind of B-movie cred. As if we needed that, on top
of all the other spurious advantages Dreadful Dubya
is stacking up at 11/2 approaches.

There must also be
a place in Hell for Russia’s
REMOTE ACCESS (sex, alienation and bad dialogue), Greece’s
DELIVERY (pizza delivery as a paradigm of our times) and Takashi Miike’s IZO, a serial-slaughter samurai movie full of
blood, noise and designer nonsense.

Never mind. Soon it
was prizes night and we remembered only the wonderful. At La Fenice opera house on a gaudy September night there was
all the fun of the fair, and unfair, as people like Sophia Loren, Stanley Donen, ScarlettJohanssen, Spike
Lee and Mike Leigh took or gave the prizes they deserved or had been deputed
to dish out.

It was unfair that
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE won only a special award for artistic excellence.
Likewise that Italy’s THE
HOUSE KEYS, to the howls of the patriotic inside and outside the building,
won nothing at all. But it was fair that Kim Ki-duk
collared a Best Director Silver Lion for 3-IRON – why, it even rhymes – and
that VERA DRAKE crowned the evening with a Golden Lion for Mike Leigh and a
Best Actress trophy for Imelda Staunton.

Like we said at the start, “Eccoil Leone”. And this lion echoes on – his roars, snarls,
purrs – as the Venice Film Festival advances into its sixties, with no sign
that anyone is trying to hand this jungle cat a pipe, a pair of slippers and
a gold watch. And as I gondola’d away, I thought no
one should be as beautiful as Sophia Loren…..

COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING
INTEREST IN WORLD FILM.